Installing facility management devices that manage equipment such as air-conditioning equipment, lighting and the like in housing in buildings and the like has become commonplace. Of these kinds of facility management devices, there are devices that, by a building manager accessing the device from a Web browser of a personal computer (user terminal), make it possible to monitor the operating state of equipment by way of a LAN (Local Area Network) inside the building, or by way of the Internet.
In this kind of facility management device, user verification is performed in order to prevent unauthorized access. When the facility management device is accessed, a login screen is displayed on the Web browser of the user terminal. The login screen is an input screen for inputting a user ID and password. After the user ID and password are inputted, user verification is performed by the facility management device using that user ID and password. When the user verification is completed properly, the contents of a Web page that was sent from the facility management device for monitoring equipment is displayed on the Web browser, and it becomes possible to monitor the state of the equipment.
Here, the case will be considered in which a facility management device is installed at the entrance to each floor of a building, or for each building (in other words, multiple facility management devices are installed). In this case, in order to simultaneously monitor the state of a plurality of equipment manage by multiple facility management devices, it is necessary to individually display multiple login screens that correspond to each of the facility management devices on the Web browser, and input the user ID and password on each login screen. That is, in order to simultaneously monitor the state of a plurality of equipment that is managed by multiple facility management devices, it is necessary to perform login for each of the target facility management devices. Therefore, as the number of facility management devices increases, the number of times that login is performed increases, so management becomes time-consuming.
Typically, as technology for making it possible to access multiple Web servers by performing verification only one time, there is single sign-on technology that uses the SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) method. In the SAML method, first, a verification server is accessed from a Web browser of a user terminal, and the verification server performs user verification. After doing so, verification information is issued to the user terminal from the verification server. The issued verification information is added and a target Web site is connected to from the user terminal, after which the Web site makes an inquiry of the verification server for the verification information. When the verification information has been properly issued, the contents of the Web site are transmitted to the user terminal.
Moreover, a verification proxy device has been disclosed that makes possible a single sign-on function that does not use the SAML method (for example, refer to Patent Literature 1). This verification proxy device issues a Cookie, in which registration information for each individual business is embedded, to a user device. The user device transmits the acquired Cookie to a resource management device of each of the businesses, after which, each resource management device allows access from the user device only when the registration information inside the Cookie matches registration information that is stored by the business.